John Thompson (1)

John Thompson

  • Counsel
  • Washington, DC

OVERVIEW

John Thompson, Counsel in Hausfeld’s Washington, DC office, devotes his practice to the dogged pursuit of economic justice for vulnerable people. He has spent the bulk of his more than twenty-year career litigating consumer-protection and financial-services enforcement actions in federal and state government. John has led or participated in precedent-setting cases addressing unfair and abusive lending practices, debt collection, and payment processing, and has obtained significant recoveries for consumers across the country.

For over a decade, John served as Senior Litigation Counsel in the Office of Enforcement at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In that role, he led or participated in investigations and litigations in several matters of first impression, including CFPB v. Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, Inc. (ability-to-repay violations in manufactured-home lending), CFPB v. Heights Finance Holding Co. (unfair and abusive installment-lending practices), CFPB v. Universal Debt & Payment Solutions, LLC (substantial-assistance theory to hold payment processors liable for phantom-debt collection), In re: Ace Cash Express (payday lender leveraging coercive collections environment to induce borrowers into serially reborrowing), and CFPB v. Richard F. Moseley, Sr. (fraudulent online-payday-lending scheme that resulted in $17 million in redress and a 14-year criminal sentence for the principal defendant). He also played an influential role in shaping the Bureau’s enforcement priorities on small-dollar lending and in developing the legal theories that underlay the CFPB’s 2017 Payday, Vehicle Title, and Certain High-Cost Installment Loans Rule.

Before joining the CFPB, John served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Consumer Protection Division of the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office. There, he successfully tried and defended on appeal a pair of landmark cases against two of the state’s most notorious payday lenders. See, e.g., State ex rel. King v. B&B Inv. Grp., 329 P.3d 658 (N.M. 2014).

John began his career in private practice, where he represented corporate clients in complex litigation and maintained an active pro bono docket, including the successful representation of indigenous Belizean parents in a child-abduction case under the Hague Convention.